NASA's Artemis 1 mission will carry an asteroid-bound solar sail

By Stefanie Waldek published 20 minutes ago

The cubesat will also use a lunar gravitational assist to catch up to asteroid 2020 GE in 2023.



An artist's depiction of the NEA Scout cubesat sailing past an asteroid. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

NASA's coming megarocket launch isn't just going to the moon, it's going far beyond that — some of its secondary payloads far, far beyond.

The primary goal of the Artemis 1 mission is the first integrated test of NASA's new Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion capsule, but 10 cubesats will also be hitching a ride to space. And one of them is headed for an asteroid.

The Near-Earth Asteroid (NEA) Scout mission — a joint project between NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in Huntsville, Alabama, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California — will see a cubesat use a solar sail to fly to an asteroid, which it will image in detail.

"The genesis of this project was a question: Can we really use a tiny spacecraft to do deep space missions and produce useful science at a low cost?" Les Johnson, the mission's principal technology investigator at MSFC, said in a statement(opens in new tab). "This is a huge challenge. For asteroid characterization missions, there's simply not enough room on a cubesat for large propulsion systems and the fuel they require."

More:
https://www.space.com/artemis-1-asteroid-solar-sail-cubesat